December 1, 1972

Arthur Miller's Creation

By CLIVE BARNES

Arthur Miller's new play, "The Creation of the World and Other Business," which opened last night at the Shubert Theater, is a Biblically based parable concerned with good, evil and the human dilemma. It emerges as a victory of craft over artistry and of mind over matter. It is a play that wants to be taken seriously because it is dealing with serious moral subjects, and to be taken all the more seriously because it is dealing with those subjects in a serio-comic fashion.

This is Mr. Miller's first Broadway comedy, and as such deserves the most careful scrutiny. Mr. Miller has done the Broadway stage some service, and it is a real pleasure to have him back and to see him trying to extend, as it were, his territory. I think most theatergoers will want to see this play, if only because Mr. Miller has won the interest of the theater world and therefore deserves that world's attention. Some people are going to be disappointed. I was myself.

Mr. Miller is trying to write a play about evil. He has veered toward the subject in the past. His Ibsenite concern with guilt and responsibility has always carried a strong feel for evil in it. The moral rectitude of his public stance also reveals nostrils flared to scent the devil. But is God also the devil? Who, in the name of creation, Mr. Miller wants to know, is responsible for the mess we are in?

It is five years since Mr. Miller's last play, "The Price." This was a successful realistic family drama, superbly crafted and yet perhaps still falling short of the radiance of his early promise. It is possible that he felt the time for this kind of play, with its humanistic resonances and reverberations, had passed. And what he decided was next, was this. It is his first comedy, and even in style quite unlike his earlier work.

Playwrights, modern playwrights at least, should perhaps beware of Biblical whimsy. Think of Clifford Odets's "The Flowering Peach," or Archibald MacLeish's "J.B." One obvious peril in this kind of play is pretentiousness, but this Mr. Miller carefully avoids. He deliberately fills his play with a folksy talk and simple jokes. The key is deliberately low, the mood determinedly frolicsome.

Mr. Miller has cast his play into three acts. Each act, so he implies in the program, is concerned with one of three questions on the Human Dilemma. In the first, God creates Eve for Adam, and, when Eve is tempted, both are expelled from Paradise. It explores the proposition, in the playwright's own words: "Since God made everything and God is god-why did he make Lucifer?"

In the second act, Eve finds herself pregnant and gives birth to Cain, watched over very interestedly by Lucifer. This act's question: "Is there something in the way we are born, which makes us want the world to be good?" In the final act, Adam and Eve and their two sons, Cain and Abel, have made some kind of adjustment to the earth. Then, tempted by a winning combination of both God and Lucifer, Cain kills Abel, and is sent out as a wanderer. This scene is said to discuss: "When every man wants justice, why does he go on creating injustice?"

Perhaps the first point to be made is that the first of these three moral questions is markedly more vital, and less platitudinous, than the other two. And the second point worth making is that even the first question is not unusually profound.

Mr. Miller does not appear to have any enlightening answers, and consequently is demanding an undue share of dramatic credibility for posing such interesting questions. He pictures God as a benevolent and avuncular paranoiac madly hungry for praise. Lucifer is, in effect, the most honest spirit within the firmament. While Adam, with his simple fervor and rabbinical wisdom, and Eve, who has a scent of chicken soup with barley around her skirts, seem like any decent Jewish immigrant couple trying to do their best for their kids in the new country.

The writing varies surprisingly. At times, Mr. Miller seems to be attempting (with differing degrees of success) Shavian dialectic, while elsewhere he is milking jokes from simple anachronisms, and homey, nudging contemporaneities of thought and linguistic usage rather, and I say this with care, like "The Flinstones," which is a television cartoon that trades on a similar line of humor. It is quite funny at times (I mean both cartoon and play) but a little cheap and easy.

It is a little unfair to quote a play out of context, and certainly these are not the best lines of the play-yet they do, I think, fairly represent the play's tone and level. God at one point says something "sets his teeth on edge." Funny, cute, or both? At another point he apostrophizes: "People have all but forgotten God-they eat to live and live to eat." That sounds more like journalism that literature. And what is one to make of a shamefaced Lucifer who cries out: "You rotten angel, I said to myself, you scum, you have betrayed the best Father in the world." Well, perhaps Lucifer does not have to be Mitonic, but such a booby as this makes a poor adversary.

Much of the writing is a lot, lot better than this. There are a few crisp jokes, and some moments of philosophical imagination. But it did not truly grip me, at least, either intellectually or dramatically.

Yet Mr. Miller is one of the most celebrated of contemporary playwrights, and I trust that everyone interested in the theater will be interested enough to make up his or her own mind about the play. And those people will be rewarded by a production that gives the play every fair shake.

Gerald Freedman's staging-from its first joking reference to a Michelangelo pose when God awakens Adam, to a final fade-out clasp of the two first lovers-seems very much at one with the play. Boris Aronson has done another of his marvelous settings-this one a dappled helix apparently floating between heaven and earth. The costumes by Hal George are quirkily imaginative, and the acting is clear, clever and resourceful.

George Grizzard's frustrated Lucifer is beautifully done, as is Stephen Elliott's grizzled, slightly smug God. Bob Dishy's pleasantly wide-eyed Adam is matched by Zoe Caldwell's slightly more knowing Eve, and Barry Primus was exceptionally forceful as the first murderer. But the whole thing has the air of a comic-strip version of Genesis.